Ivan Dziuba (1931–2022)

Ivan Dziuba was a dissident, literary critic, Minister of Culture of Ukraine, and co-founder of the People's Movement of Ukraine, the first opposition party in Soviet Ukraine. He played a key role in restoring Ukraine's independence in 1991. Dziuba was born in 1931 in the village of Mykolaivka in the Donetsk region. It was a tragic and terrible time of the Holodomor, starvation by famine. Searching for a way to survive, his family moved to the village of Novotroitske and then to Olenivski Kariery, where Dziuba completed his high school education. Russification was rampant then, so the young man spoke mainly Russian from an early age. He received a diploma in Russian philology from the Donetsk Pedagogical Institute and later completed postgraduate studies at the Taras Shevchenko Institute of Literature. During this period, Dziuba became an active member of the Creative Youth Club, where he met and befriended Vasyl Symonenko, Lina Kostenko, Ivan Svitlychny, Alla Horska, and Ivan Drach. This cohort of talented Ukrainians soon spoke up against the regime, thus coming under the watchful eye of the Soviet secret services.

September 1965 became a turning point in the life of Ivan Dziuba. Speaking before an audience at the opening night of the movie Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors in Kyiv, he protested against the arrests of young artists. This act got him fired from the Molod Publishing House, and for several years, Dziuba worked as a proofreader for the Ukrainian Biological Journal in a kind of isolation from literature and literary studies. In 1965, he wrote the famous book Internationalism or Russification?, highlighting problematic national relations in a socialist society. This text drew the ire of the party leaders as it was clearly anti-Soviet, although based on Soviet postulates that were hard to deny. Not surprisingly, the book was pronounced ideologically harmful.

For Dziuba, this meant expulsion from the Writers' Union of Ukraine in 1972, followed by his arrest. In 1973, he was sentenced to five years in prison and another five years of exile for anti-Soviet activities. Considering his fragile health, which rapidly deteriorated behind bars, Dziuba asked the Supreme Soviet of the Ukrainian SSR for a pardon. Once free, he managed to avoid the next prison sentence only thanks to the aircraft designer Oleh Antonov, who employed him as a proofreader at the Kyiv Aviation Plant.

In the late 1980s, the political situation softened somewhat, and Dziuba could resume social and political activities. In the autumn of 1989, he co-founded the People's Movement of Ukraine and headed the Republican Association of Ukrainian Studies. Two years later, he became the editor-in-chief of the Suchasnist journal. Dziuba led an active political life in the independent Ukraine. He was the Minister of Culture from 1992 to 1994 and a co-founder of the First of December initiative group, which he belonged to from 2011 to 2019. Dziuba also chaired the committee awarding the Taras Shevchenko National Prize in 1999–2005 and was an honorary doctor at the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy.

Importantly, in addition to his active pro-Ukrainian position, Dziuba was one of the first dissidents to support and promote Ukrainian-Jewish dialogue and understanding actively. He was the one who openly spoke about the tragedy of the Holocaust during the commemoration of the 25th anniversary of the Babyn Yar massacre on 26 September 1966. The Soviet secret services closely watched Dziuba at the time, but this did not stop him.

"I want to speak to you, Jews, as a Ukrainian, as a member of the Ukrainian nation, to which I proudly belong. Babyn Yar is a tragedy for all humanity, but it happened on Ukrainian soil. And that's why Ukrainians, just like Jews, have no right to forget about it. Babyn Yar is our common tragedy, above all, the tragedy of the Jewish and Ukrainian peoples," Dziuba said at the ceremony. These words were probably the first public statement made by a Ukrainian about the Babyn Yar tragedy.

In 2016, Dziuba received the Metropolitan Andrey Sheptytsky Award during Babyn Yar commemoration days. This award is granted by the Jewish Confederation of Ukraine and the Ukrainian Jewish Encounter to persons from Ukraine, Israel, and the Ukrainian or Jewish diasporas for their contribution to fostering Ukrainian-Jewish relations.

Dziuba died on 22 February 2022, two days before the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine. He is buried at Baikove Cemetery in Kyiv. In his conversation for the book Dialogues of Understanding. Ukrainian-Jewish Relations (Dukh i Litera, 2011), Dziuba noted:

"Let me start with childhood years. There were maybe two or three Jews in our workers' village. There was a doctor at the hospital where my mother worked as a nurse, and he cared for me a little. There was another Jewish family who were also doctors. I learned to paint with their son, Vitia, who was much better at painting than me. Of course, I did not perceive them as Jews at the time. I grasped this later. When the war broke out, there were rumors that the Germans were persecuting the Jews, but they did not believe it. The Germans were such a cultured nation. This had to be mere propaganda. However, they still left and thus survived. Among those who did not leave was a worker in a tin workshop. He either had no opportunity to leave or didn't care. They forced him to wear a band on a sleeve, and then he disappeared. Apparently, he was 'liquidated.' This was my first encounter with the fact that there was a problem of the Jews. Of course, I did not understand it that way; I just sympathized."

Translated from the Ukrainian by Vasyl Starko.